APPS are taking East Africa by storm. As mobile phone penetration rates increase, technologists and software developers in the region are scrambling to provide bigger and better services for an ever-growing consumer base. At the center of this flurry of activity is Nairobi, Kenya. But Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania and Uganda's Kampala may not be far behind.

This past June in Nairobi, the competition Pivot 25 showcased what this burgeoning movement is about. Twenty-five mobile tech startups pitched their ideas to a room of hundreds. The event provided an interesting lens through which to look at app development's short but bustling history in East Africa these last few years. Three finalists – Taha Jiwaji, Edwin Seno and Ernest Mwebaze  – discuss their experiences along with one of the competition's organizers, Erik Hersman.

Jiwaji, 25, designed Bongo Live, a targeted SMS advertising service, the first of its kind in Tanzania. Seno, 26, is a Kenyan developer who created Jamobi, an accounting app for workers in the informal economy. Mwebaze, 32, a Ugandan Ph.D student at Makerere University,  built an app called Mobile Crop Disease Surveillance to help cassava farmers. Hersman is a leading technologist in Nairobi and also a TED Senior Fellow.

Beginnings

Erik Hersman: Why Kenya, why Nairobi? I think you have to step back and look at all of Africa to make sense of it.

Taha Jiwaji: I'm from Tanzania, I grew up here, and went to university in the United States. I'm a technology person – I studied computer engineering. But I'd seen the telecom industry developing here [in Tanzania], and thought this is definitely the space I would like to be in.

Erik Hersman: Coming out of the universities, you have a lot of young computer science graduates. They might not have any business skills, but they are building apps and building services. They've seen the success of others that have made it halfway up the mountain here, and think, 'I can be one of those. I don't just have to go work for someone, I can be a startup if I want to.'

Edwin Seno: I'd been working for one of the largest mobile operators in Kenya, and after that I decided to venture into business and started a mobile solutions company called Outside The Box Africa (OTB Africa Ltd.). We strived to develop mobile solutions that would be indigenous in such a way that they would be tailored for the African market.

Erik Hersman: While East Africa is still in the early stages of the technology growth it's going to have, it already has a competitive advantage compared to most anywhere else in the world on mobile applications.

Ernest Mwebaze: We're a group of [Ugandan] Ph.D students working in the area of artificial intelligence. We thought it would be interesting to build on these techniques. The normal app development has been an app that does SMS or that is relatively simple, but integrating computer vision techniques into a phone app is where we got our brilliance.

Erik Hersman: It's really just a matter of having more success stories and seeing some of these ideas flourish beyond Kenya's borders into East Africa and into the rest of the world before it becomes a major hub for tech innovation in the world.

Pivot 25, June 2011

Erik Hersman: We had this competition called Pivot 25. There were over 100 applicants from Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. They pitched their ideas to a judging panel and a room of 300 people. There were some really great ideas.

Taha Jiwaji: I just applied online. While I was in the United States, I [had] started developing this application [Bongo Live] that leveraged SMS, which was already very popular in Tanzania, as a medium for advertising and communication for businesses. We're now also trying to develop other apps that leverage SMS.

Edwin Seno: We wanted to provide a bookkeeping solution that would allow small scale traders – someone who sells vegetables on the road, or secondhand clothes, or artisans who create metallic items to sell – to keep track of what they're selling. That's how we came up with the idea for Jamobi. [These traders] don't have access to computers, some don't even have the knowledge to operate a computer. But they all have mobile phones.

Ernest Mwebaze: The disease is called cassava mosaic disease. Using computer vision techniques [the phone] takes a picture of a cassava leaf, identifies features from that, and determines whether the image depicts a diseased plant or a healthy plant. The way they do it traditionally is that they get a bunch of experts deployed throughout the country with paper forms, and using their expert knowledge they fill out these paper forms saying how many crops are diseased, what's the severity of disease in different areas of the country. Decision makers look at this data and make decisions about what innovations to make after four, five months. It's inefficient. If the phone can diagnose the disease and severity, then you don't need an expert. A person down in the field can do this survey. Decision makers can look at this data immediately and make decisions on where to send help.

Erik Hersman: Some of these ideas were coming out of the woodwork. There's a real hunger for that here. I don't know if it's a catalyzing effect that's happened over the last couple of years.